Nature Based Spirituality
"Most compassionate people I know work with the soil whenever they can. Gardening for them us much more than a hobby. It is a way of life and a way of wisdom. The soil teaches us something that is necessary for becoming compassionate." - Matthew Fox, A Spirituality Named Compassion
"Nature makes the Divine tangible. Nature is the gown the Goddess wears to make herself visible, and the God dances to express his joy. Looking at Nature, we see living, incarnate divinity." - Phyllis Curott, WitchCrafting
Panentheism is the belief that we are in God and God is in us. We can go inward to reach Spirit, and we can go outward to find Goddess as well. It is a dialectic: Both/And. We exist in God, and God exists in us. Panentheism can be a useful tool for understanding the sacred nature of Nature. It is God, as are we, though God is also bigger than Nature and bigger than we.
Confused? Go sit next to a tree or in a park or a by a stream, and meditate on the idea that God is in us and we are in God. See what arises. Sit in that wonder.
Blessed be.
http://www.eco-spirituality.org/e-dclr.htm
http://www.metahistory.org/Ecospirituality.php
"Ultimately,
however, the value of such practices as neo-shamanism and neo-paganism
may not lie so much in their ability to connect us directly with nature
as it does in their ability to connect us directly to the modes of
perception we lost when we left the old gods behind in the primordial
forests of our ancestors. These modes of perception then become the
invitation to the land of faerie, the key that unlocks the passage back
to connection with the earth mother."-Owen Couch